A Pit Stop with WikiProject NASCAR

Operation "Majestic Titan" is looking for editors interested in working in a collegial environment to help write articles and/or review FACs related to all of the battleships and battlecruisers ever built

Royalbroil, an admin, describes himself as "a long-term fan of motorsports" who is "interested in the history of auto racing." Royalbroil enjoys working on biographical articles in particular and has experience promoting Good Articles. Nascar1996 is "a fan of NASCAR for three years." When the project fell on hard times, Nascar1996's efforts to revive the project inspired other editors to join, eliciting praise from Airplaneman during our interview. NerdyScienceDude, "a big NASCAR fan," joined the project to "help out [by] adding NASCAR races to this growing encyclopedia" and has promoted several good articles in a short amount of time. Doctorindy has "nearly 30-years of interest in all forms of auto racing, including NASCAR" with a preference toward the '70s, '80s, and early '90s.

Have you contributed to one of the project's 11 good articles? Are there any articles you are currently working toward achieving GA or FA status? Share your experiences with us.

Royalbroil: I like working on biographies and I asked 4u1e for coaching to get the Mario Andretti article to Good status. After it passed, I started working alone and improved Alan Kulwicki to Good status. Article creation got easier with the added experience, and I worked Tim Richmond and David Pearson up to Good standards. I think that Kulwicki's article is near Featured level and plan to keep working on it.

Four of the project's good articles and another four former good articles are about races that occurred this year. How does your project produce quality articles about recent events in such a short time?

Royalbroil: Early in 2010, Nascar1996 asked me for some coaching on the expectations for a Good Article. He and NerdyScienceDude have worked hard on recent race articles and they have been impressive new members to the WikiProject.

Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?

Doctorindy: After contributing to Wikiproject NASCAR for several months, I branched off and took the initiative to start the WikiProject American Open Wheel Racing (IndyCars & Indy 500) in Oct. 2006.

What are WikiProject NASCAR's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Royalbroil: The most pressing needs are keeping the career statistics up to date. Another major need is to watch the articles for vandalism and unsourced content, especially on articles for drivers who are more frequent vandalism targets such at Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.. Another area that a new contributor could help is to try to find free-use pictures of drivers from free image resources. Flickr has proven to be a great resource.

Nascar1996: Our project has many pressing needs, but assessing all the articles in the unassessed articles category is probably one of the biggest.

Doctorindy: Among many general needs, the race pages could use help in creating race summaries. In many cases, the race pages only summarize recent runnings, suffering from "recent-ism."

Doctorindy concluded the interview by pointing to the collaborative community built around motorsports: "I've noticed a fair and refreshing amount of cooperation between the editors spanning the several genres of auto racing (NASCAR, IndyCar/Champ Cart, F1, sports cars, etc.)" Despite the differences of opinion between fans of each type of racing, Doctorindy noted that the project has seen "no sparring between NASCAR and open wheel fans (particularly IRL/CART), as would be expected in internet message boards..."

I saw a pile of Nascar articles at GAN recently and the content generally seemed very much on the skinny side, in comparison to the analysis of various technical issues on analogous F1 race GAs. Some of these have had their GAs revoked although some of these seem to have been quick-revoked because of the reviewer being a banned reincarnation rather than any explicit problems that were missed. For example there is no discussion of whether certain cars are suited to certain tracks (maybe the cars/tracks are all the same) and some have no background section or just list the points standing; some teams may have done upgrades between races, for instance, as always happens in F1 YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 02:12, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Please review to most up to date NASCAR race articles such as 2010 Carfax 400. Also, all the cars are the same for every race track, except on ovals over 2.5 mile long, then they add a restrictor plate to slow them down. --Nascar1996Contributions / Guestbook 13:46, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Yellowmonkey, all of the cars are identical by rule and are tested with templates to certain tolerances. You can read about the vehicle at Car of Tomorrow. I wonder if some of the photos that I took at a NASCAR Nationwide race are up to Featured level [1]. Someofthem are close in my opinion. Royalbroil 03:13, 24 August 2010 (UTC)